My beloved Fender Stratocaster (FSR Classic Player 50s) usually is my weapon of choice but when I enter heavier territories it lacks the fat Humbucker tones I get out of my SG or Les Paul. To get both styles in the same guitar I ‘ve been looking around and found the Hot Rail Humbucker from Seymour Duncan. It is a Humbucker in the style of a regular single coil pickup and it also comes with the possibility of coil splitting so it can be a fat warm Humbucker and a single coil.

 

One thing I do not like with coil splitting are the regular push/pull switches because I think they are kind of “in the way” when pulled, especially on a Stratocaster. Luckily Fender realered the so called S1-switch which works like a regular volume switch plus push/pull functionality integrated in a decent way by pressing the tip of the volume knob. Actually these are all the components I needed to open up a whole new world of tone for my guitar! So let’s get started with the single steps.

Pickup wiring 

The wiring is pretty easy with the schematics which are provided by Seymour Duncan. I had to open up the isolation a bit because the single wires were a bit short.

There weren’t any schematics in the packaging of the switch a quick internet search gave me a nice explanation from PremierGuitar as you can see here in the image below. In short you just have to connect coil split cable of the pickup with position 1 of the switch which means that coil split is active when the button is pushed.

Classic tone mod

One thing I don’t like that much in a classic Stratocaster wiring is that your bridge pickup isn’t tone controlled. But this can be adjusted easily by soldering a connection between the middle tone knob and the bridge pickup. Also here, a quick search gave me all I needed to connect the new pickup with the middle tone knob.

Oh, and since I am a GoPro fan I did also a rather boring time lapse video of the whole “operation”!